30 Variations and a Microphone

Glenn Gould was booked into 30th Street Studio for the two middle weeks of June in 1955. The weather in New York was sunny, the temperature in the 60s. He arrived at the studio by taxi from a hotel near Central Park, wearing an overcoat, a beret, a scarf and gloves, and carrying a leather suitcase and his folding chair. He stripped down to a dress shirt and a sleeveless V-neck sweater. Opening the suitcase, he set out pills, bottled water and towels. Rolling up his sleeves, he ran hot water in a sink, the sort of deep-basin porcelain sink that mops are wrung out in, and soaked his hands and forearms until they were red.

Earlier that year, he paid a visit to the Steinway & Sons showroom on 57th Street: in the basement, several dozen grand pianos stood side by side, and he had played them in succession, finally identifying one he liked.

Now the piano, known as No. 174, was in the studio, with microphones arrayed around it. He set up his chair and settled himself before the keyboard. He took off his shoes, so he could move his feet without making noises that would be picked up on tape.

Over the next few days he fussed over the precise atmospheric conditions of the space around the piano. He complained of a draft. He insisted that a space heater be set up near the piano. He asked for a piece of carpeting to put under his feet. He jousted with a technician about the tuning of the instrument: “Listen,” he griped, plonking an ever-so-slightly-awry key, “who the heck tuned this piano this morning?” During breaks, he ate only crackers (“arrowroot biscuits”) instead of the sandwiches the label brought in, and drank only water or skim milk.

Gould is often characterized as a perfectionist, and the recording process is said to have been a tool in the service of his perfectionism, enabling him to choose between takes based on microdistinctions of color and emphasis. But outtakes from these sessions, since made available, suggest that in 1955 he used the studio in the opposite way: to maximize risk-taking, to push each of the short pieces that make up Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations to its furthest physical, musical, spiritual extreme.

The record, “Bach: The Goldberg Variations,” was released on Jan. 3, 1956. Half a century later, it is justly celebrated as an all-time great debut. The freshness of Gould’s approach — 38½ minutes; no repeats; no pedal, no rubato; no fidelity to older models — was obvious to people who knew something about classical music

.. But its power was also apparent to people who were coming to the music for the first time: bright, swift, sprung forward, urgent even in the slow variations, it is a record that opens up the music of Bach and the classical tradition through its arresting clarity and directness.

What qualities, precisely, account for the power of the record?

One is the shift in emphases it brought about. In it an old tradition is made new, and an Old World practice is planted on the North American continent. After a century of Romantic melody, rhythm is given its due.

Another is its fit with the long-playing format. A work of about 40 minutes that splits in two right down the middle and circles back to its beginning at the end of Part 2: there could have been no better demonstration piece for the qualities of the LP. The LP, which needed flipping, legislated a pause between the first 15 variations and the second 15 — a pause so physically audible that today, in other formats, which allow the music to run straight through, the transition seems rushed. And the LP registered Gould’s youth and vitality in its grooves: unlike the characteristic classical-music recital debuts — each the stuff of legend and awed report — this one, made for the first time in a recording studio, can be heard as if for the first time now and forevermore.

Through the advent of the LP, the record player had already become for the second half of the century what the piano had been for the first half: the instrument of instruments and the furniture of middle-class cultural aspirations. Gould, better than most musicians, understood the implications of this change. He grasped that this transformation of the listener’s experience called for a transformation of the performer’s experience too; he saw that the LP opened up what he called “the prospects of recording.”

With his approach to recording, which produced a whole work from the aggregation of different takes, he tapped the essence of the long-playing record, which set different pieces of music alongside one another in the bands of a single disc, rather than giving each piece or section its own side, as the 78 had. And with the repetition of each piece during the recording process, he approximated the listener’s experience of music in the age of recordings, which was that of hearing the same piece over and over again, becoming intimate with it through mechanized repetition. It was as if through the playing of each piece over and over, Gould was pressing it into the groove of the LP.

At the same time, Gould’s grasp of the power of recordings was owing to the fact that he came of age when the music of Bach in particular was being revived through recordings. As he put it, he grew up in an era that “above all . . . paid homage to the spirit of Sebastian Bach” — an era in which “virtually every major musician was determined to follow his example, to work as it was deemed he had worked — as an artisan, a sober, conscientious craftsman in whom diligence and inspiration were inextricably intertwined.” This was Gould’s ideal. For him, Bach was “first and last, an architect, a constructor of sound, and what makes him so inestimably valuable to us is that he was beyond a doubt the greatest architect of sound who ever lived.”

To transcend means to climb over, and that is what he was doing in the act of recording. The “Goldberg” Variations is a piece of architecture. Gould is climbing over Bach’s construction, clambering over the whole.

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Gould used the studio, first of all, to give full expression to the variety of the parts. By recording the variations one at a time, in multiple takes, he set them apart from one another, exaggerating their individuality. Each of them can be considered with wonder. But something is lost when the variations are taken apart — sold separately, as it were. Gould recognized this as well, and even as he used technology to isolate the parts, he used his technique as a pianist to make them whole.

There is no piece of music whose history is so divided into “before” and “after” by one performer as the history of the “Goldberg” Variations is divided into before and after by Glenn Gould. And few artists have been so good at presenting a self-image and making it central to their art. But Gould went further: he imprinted his image of himself onto Bach. This is a good measure of Gould’s achievement — that he made an unlikeness seem a likeness. From the “Goldberg” Variations on, he identified Bach with himself and proposed that Bach heard things the way he did, and eventually the interpenetration of composer and interpreter became so complete in the public mind that each took on qualities of the other. Bach, like Gould, became a genius who found in provincial life the solitude he needed in order to conduct his research into fugue and sacred song. Gould, like Bach, became a religious artist, giving the worldly music for keyboard a mystic charge — making the recording studio a sanctum, a concert hall with an unseen audience, and turning the recording-studio experiment into a sacred rite.

Twenty-six years later, in 1981, Glenn Gould was sitting at the piano in a darkened room in Toronto, pondering his prospects.

About the prospects of recording he had been right. Long after Gould had stopped playing for live audiences, the recital was not dead, but the virtuoso’s nightly wire-walk before a hushed crowd was no longer the center of classical music life. The recital was just one of the diverse ways in which the music could be encountered, and scholarship was making clear that that was always the case — that the recital was the exception, not the rule.

Gould had been right. So what to do about it? There in a small room in Toronto he came to a decision that would surprise everyone. He would make a new recording of the “Goldberg” Variations.

There was a simple reason: Columbia Records was ceasing its operations at 30th Street Studio; the technologically altered church would be sold to a real-estate developer, who would raze it and put up a giant apartment building in its place. Gould was attached to certain rooms no less than certain pianos, and he leapt at the chance to go to 30th Street one last time.

But there were other reasons. Digital sound offered him a chance to replace the 1955 recording, whose mono sound he had considered antiquated ever since “somebody had the nerve to invent something called stereo.” Columbia Masterworks had cobbled together an “anniversary album” to mark Gould’s first 25 years with the label; Masterworks never saw a milestone it didn’t like, and a big one was approaching: Gould’s 50th birthday. A new “Goldberg” Variations would be a last tango in the big room where Gould had consummated the act of recording.

CBS Masterworks issued the “Goldberg” Variations in September 1982 on LP and audiocassette, each with a diagonal band in the upper right indicating that it was a digital recording.

Gould turned 50 on Sept. 25. The next day — Sunday, Sept. 26, 1982 — The New York Times ran a long article (more than 2,000 words) about the new record, comparing it favorably with the 1955 recording. “The early performance is rambunctious, exuberant, relishing its power and freedom,” the reviewer, Edward Rothstein, wrote. “This record is less viscerally intoxicating, but more affecting, more serious, more seductive in its depth. There are moments of too much insistence, and there are seemingly inconsistent repeats, but the performance is bound tightly together. . . . This will not be a performance to everyone’s taste, but Mr. Gould’s playing is still of crucial importance to the very music world he rejects.”

Gould was exultant about the article. He called Jessie Grieg, the cousin he had known since his boyhood, and read the entire piece into the telephone. He called a number of friends and did the same thing. He called the reviewer and thanked him.

And then he was dead. The next day he had a stroke in his apartment. He resisted going to the hospital at first, then struggled to get there, where he spoke with a doctor and a few visitors, grew less and less coherent, then lost consciousness. He went into a coma, with brain damage indicated, and was put on life support, which was removed four days later at his father’s request. The Times ran an obituary under the headline: “Glenn Gould, Pianist, Is Dead; Saw Recordings as an Art Form.”

This essay was adapted from “Reinventing Bach,” to be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux on Sept. 18.

A version of this article appears in print on September 9, 2012, on Page MM48 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: ‘Turning the Recording-Studio Experiment Into a Sacred Rite’. Today's Paper|Subscribe